Just the beginning

Each time I finish a piece of  this, it reminds me of about 15 other things that I still have to do, some of which I hadn't even thought of originally-- kind of exciting but also a little scary...

I spent a lot of time recently working on the design and implementation of saving mentor suggestions and displaying them to other mentors. I took some of Michael's ideas and am currently setting a flag (like isEnabled) to true when a statement is added in the Mentor perspective. The statement is, for now, displayed in green if the world is being edited or viewed in the Mentor perspective. I plan to do deletion and parameter changes in a similar way and make these only visible when a mentor is viewing existing suggestions. However, in the future, mentors won't be looking at the exact code change another mentor has made. Instead, they will be viewing how the code change applies to their student's code (the end state of the tutorial the student would receive). This is probably something that I will work on down the road a little bit, but I think deciding how to use a rule and a code change to make tutorials for any student and show the changes to mentors will be some of the hardest pieces of this system.

Getting close to the end of the Mentor Your Student section also brings up the issue of how this will connect to the community. I'm currently just showing bookmarked worlds and top worlds in my views to emulate pulling worlds from the community for viewing, but there is actually a lot to do on the community side to make all of this work. Mentors need to be connected to students so that they can view their student's worlds. When a mentor makes a suggestion, it will be shown in the View Suggestions section so that other mentors can write a rule for it. Once a rule is written, the combination of the rule and the suggestion need to be used to create "existing suggestions" for mentors to view and tutorials for students. Since the rules can be constantly changing as mentors edit them, these should not be created once and saved, but created as needed (hopefully very quickly!!).

I feel like I am making progress toward being close to finishing a lot of pieces of the Mentor Your Student section, so hopefully I can finish up a few things there before moving onto some of these larger beasts.